Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  It resulted in the formation of a short-lived new group, Angel And The Snake, which featured Harry, Stein, Smith and O’Connor, later joined by two backing singers known simply as Julie and Jackie – the latter of whom worked with Debbie at the newly opened White’s Pub on Wall Street.

  The reconfigured band made their debut at a near-empty CBGB’s in mid-August, supported by The Ramones. “We knew Tommy [Erdelyi] from the Mercer Arts Center,” recounted Chris. “One night, we saw him at the 82 Club, and he said, ‘I have this band called The Ramones, we don’t know where to play, where do you guys play?’ So I figured he was playing with Puerto Ricans or something, with a Spanish name …”

  “The guy who did The Ramones’ artwork, Arturo Vega, used to come to CBGB’s wearing a Mexican wrestling mask; for six months he was known only as ‘the guy in the mask’,” Chris recalled. “The guy from The Screamers, Tomata Du Plenty, Gorilla Rose, and Fayette Hauser, who’s the sister of one of the guys in Manhattan Transfer, used to have this weird drag cabaret, and us and The Ramones used to open up for them. Everybody was very supportive; only when the attention came did rivalries start.”

  After a second CBGB’s gig as Angel And The Snake a fortnight later, the band ditched their new name. “1974 was the non-period of punk,” insisted Deborah. “Television, The Ramones and us, either as Angel And The Snake or with no name, were just playing around.” This ‘non-period’ saw Debbie and Chris develop their songwriting partnership as a succession of singers and players drifted in and out of the group. “It didn’t happen in the early days because we weren’t formed musically and we seemed always to be in a state of flux,” observed Chris. “I don’t think any of the bands were really doing too much at that period. All the bands were fucking around, not really getting anywhere.”

  First to join was guitarist Ivan Kral, who arrived in October but lasted just three months before departing to hook up with Patti Smith’s band in January 1975. “Ivan just got bored,” explained Debbie. “There was no publicity, no attention focused on anyone. Ivan was working at the Bleecker Street Cinema and he was always moving. He moved about three times in those three months.”

  That same month, Jackie and Julie were ousted in favour of Tish and Snooky Bellomo, who would later go on to open the Manic Panic boutique and sing with the notorious Sic Fucks. “I met them through these guys Gorilla and Tomata,” Deborah explained. “They used to do comedy skits at CBGB’s, things like ‘Babs the Stunt Girl’ or ‘Savage Voodoo Nuns’. Tish and Snooky were in some of the crazier shows.”

  “That’s when we were ‘Blondie And The Banzai Babies’. Tish and Snooky sang back-up with us, on and off for over a year and a half,” Debbie later elaborated. “We were a dance band but, to tell the truth, we were so bad that to call us a garage band, to call us a band, was a great compliment. We were a gutter band; ‘sewer band’ is a closer description. We weren’t getting any reviews, didn’t have any support from any record company, Chris’ guitar cost $40, he didn’t even have an amplifier, and our drummer couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to be a drummer or a doctor.”

  “It seemed like they really didn’t have any drive, but obviously they did,” reflected Tish. “It seemed like the whole time [I was] in the band they didn’t have any idea what they were doing.”

  “Debbie decided we should be a disco dance band,” added Snooky. “She got us a job playing Brandy’s Too, an Upper East Side singles place, two long sets a night. The crowd was half friends, who came up to hang out, and half the sleazy singles crowd. They didn’t understand a thing, missed lots of the lyrics – like one song that we did called ‘Funky Anus’.”

  “The Ramones came to open for us,” continued Tish. “But they started out with ‘Sniffin’ Glue’, and the management asked them to leave. The Tuff Darts walked out in a huff when management told ‘em they were too loud.”

  “We were having a good time and weren’t really too career-orientated at the time,” rationalised Chris.

  Anya Phillips, who met Debbie while they were both working the bar at White’s Pub and would become one of the vocalist’s closest friends, was among the few who caught the group during this period of instability. “At that time there would be maybe five people in the place. I don’t think they even had a cover or admission at the door yet. It was really, really empty. The Ramones opened for Angel And The Snake … they knew they were changing the name to Blondie and adding two girl back-up singers … Debbie wore turquoise blue stretch leotard tops and red stockings and she used to do this song called ‘Platinum Blonde’, where she had this ratty wig and this sort of beat up dress; she’d come on stage and start singing, ‘I wanna be a platinum blonde,’ and rip off the wig and platinum dress. Chris used to come to the pub to pick her up after work every day. He had long hair and blue eye-shadow and used to wear these leather chaps.

  “They hadn’t been going together all that long, I think just a few months at that point, but they were really in love,” added Anya. “By around October or November [1974] Jackie was singing in the band with another girl named Julie, and all three of them were blonde, so I guess that was the idea of Blondie.”

  “Julie and Jackie sang back-up for a while, then we took the name Blondie,” confirmed Deborah. “I remember it fit together really well, because all three of us were blondes. Then right before our first gig, Jackie dyed her hair dark brown. That didn’t work out.”

  Like much of their early songwriting, the name for Chris and Debbie’s unstable band drew directly from the New York streets. “The street noise was, ‘Hey, Blondie! Hey, Blondie!’ I’m like, ‘Jesus …’ Because we were trying to think of a band name and there it was, right in front of me,’ recalled Debbie. “Blondie was a comic coming to life … the idea of a drawing coming to life and stepping on to a stage had a terrific shrillness about it … I wanted to create this character who was primarily having fun.” (When truck drivers and construction workers shouted, “Hey Blondie!”, they unconsciously referenced a vintage newspaper ‘funny’/comic strip of that title that had entered the popular consciousness.)

  After two gigs at CBGB’s supporting Television in January 1975 and another pair of shows in support of The Miamis at the turn of the month, the group might not have been any nearer to establishing a settled line-up or image. But at least they now had a name that would stick.

  Chapter Five

  New York Rockers

  “We were working against great odds. We didn’t have any money, yet we pursued and persisted. We were tenacious. We kept working the angles, scraping by.”

  Debbie Harry

  As the Bowery began to thaw after another bitter winter, Debbie and Chris’ aspirations for their newly named band were in a state of flux. Although 1975 would prove a pivotal year for Blondie, initially the group’s personnel, direction and image were so uncertain that their new name was the only concrete element. “We were experimenting a lot,” Deborah explained. “Usually, bands have just one style, but we were trying out lots of different styles of music. So it took us longer. That’s the only thing I can put it down to. When you look at The Ramones, they do their style of song and they’ve focused it and perfected it. We were doing lots of things, so they took longer to perfect.”

  “We worked a lot and just hoped that something would develop,” bassist Fred Smith recalled. “We were a little erratic, you know. We had this drummer who kept passing out, he’d just collapse.”

  Billy O’Connor’s nodding out was symptomatic of his uncertainty as to whether he actually wanted to be a professional musician. By March he reached a decision to quit the band and pursue a career in law. With no obvious replacements immediately available, the group placed an advertisement in The Village Voice: ‘Freak Energy Rock Drummer Wanted’.

  Over 40 would-be energetic freaks responded and auditions were duly held. “Most of the guys who came in were schrumpy-looking schlumps in fringe jackets without the fringe. We had to throw some of them out of the room,” recounte
d Debbie. “When Chris and I first discussed putting a band together, we said we didn’t want sidemen. We didn’t want people just to be a blank wall that could be painted on. We wanted personalities; we wanted features and felt that that was an intrinsic thing about a band. We felt that all the bands that we really liked had characters that stood out on their own.”

  One of the last aspirants to pass through the midtown rehearsal room was Clement Burke, a 20-year old from Bayonne, New Jersey, who had been orbiting the scene around Club 82 and CBGB’s in recent months. “I knew Debbie and Chris were looking for a drummer so I went along to an audition,” said Clem. “We sat around for the whole time and we had a lot of common interests in music and the arts, people like Burroughs and The MC5 and The Velvet Underground, but also The Ronettes and bubblegum rock. We went on to play a couple of songs.”

  “We auditioned 40 drummers in two days and Clem was the last one to come in,” Deborah remembers. “He was very experienced. He’d been in bands since he was about 14 years old or something. He was famous in New Jersey and the surrounding towns where he played.” In addition to being an accomplished drummer, Clem’s sartorial style – he showed up wearing a red US Navy shirt based on one previously sported by The Who’s Keith Moon, and what Debbie later described as “fancy shoes” – identified sixties anglophile influences a galaxy removed from the procession of Grand Funk-obsessed hair farmers who preceded him. “We liked him immediately because he was one of the very best players, but more importantly he had a charismatic quality,” asserted Deborah. “Clem was definitely what we were looking for … Keith Moon, the biggest influence on his playing, style and outlook, fitted right in with the rock greats Chris and I emulated.”

  “The first time I met Debbie I was completely drawn to her charisma. She was undoubtedly a star, a diamond in the rough, a tremendously charismatic person. I had already liked girl group stuff, Shangri-Las, Ronettes; I was already tuned into that. And for me she was of that ilk,” remembered Clem. “My whole thing was that I wanted to find my Marc Bolan, or my David Bowie or Mick Jagger. I wanted to find somebody with that much potential. They had some interesting songs and they were doing original music, and I wanted to play original music. I wasn’t very much interested in being a club band.”

  In addition to empathy with Debbie’s broad concept, Clem quickly adapted to Chris’ maverick energy. “He had this Alice Cooper fixation at the time. He was really creative on guitar, but he’d present an idea, and you’d have to work with him.”

  Born in Bayonne on November 24, 1954, Clement Anthony Bozewski grew up in a highly musical environment. “My dad was a society drummer and there were drums around the house. I think the first record that hit me was probably ‘Wipeout’ by The Surfaris, which is kind of appropriate, and then The Beatles records,” he recalled. “I tried to play the guitar but I’m left-handed and all my friends were right-handed so they couldn’t show me the chords so I started playing the drums. I was about 14.”

  Following in his father’s rhythmic footsteps, Clem enrolled in the local drum and bugle corps and his grammar school orchestra, both of which helped his endurance and technique, before forming a series of rock’n’roll bands. “It was a good way to meet girls,” he grinned. “I had a band my first two years of high school and another band my second two years. We would win Battle of the Bands, and there was this DJ in New York, Bruce Morrow, who had this show called Cousin Brucie’s Big Break where everyone sent in music. I think we recorded on a mono reel-to-reel tape recorder, and you sent that in and if you got selected, he played it on the radio and then you got to go into the recording studio. We were selected and we won and we went to ABC studios and recorded. That was my first recording session.”

  As a result of their success in Morrow’s contest, Clem’s band, Total Environment, got to play at Carnegie Hall. “We had a light show, the whole thing,” he recalled. “So I was always in bands at the time. I was in an art rock band and we played a high school assembly and we did ‘Peaches en Regalia’, the Frank Zappa tune, with full-on band and vibes, timpani, keyboards. I think we went into ‘Willie The Pimp’ by Captain Beefheart after that.”

  Although interested in the experimentalism epitomised by Zappa and Beefheart, Clem’s passion for reductive rock’n’roll led him to seek out like-minded accomplices for a new band, Sweet Revenge. “I was a big New York Dolls fan and a big fan of David Bowie, Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel, The Sweet, T.Rex,” he explained. “Basically, the friends I knew who were into Zappa and Beefheart didn’t like that stuff at all. So I found people along the way who were into it.”

  After a couple of gigs at Club 82 with Sweet Revenge, Clem began hanging out at CBGB’s. “Everyone cut their hair and started wearing leather jackets,” he recounted. “There were no punks at CBGB’s – it was more like bohemian, outcast type of people. It was like a clubhouse for beatniks with about 100 people. I was like 18 years old, just a kid on the streets of New York and by that time we got a storefront on the Lower East Side where we would crash in.”

  Within four weeks of auditioning for Blondie, Clem would make his live debut at CBGB’s. However, in keeping with the group’s inability to maintain a settled line-up, it was also Fred Smith’s final appearance with the group. “I had an intuition with Fred,” Deborah revealed. “He was really unhappy at the beginning of the month. At the end of the month, we had a gig at CBGB and we played terrible the first set. I didn’t know what had happened, but during the break between sets, Fred had told Chris he was quitting to join Television. Our next set was worse. We had played a long time with Fred. We were struck dumb by the whole thing, by the whole movement against us. I may be paranoid, but I think that whole clique wanted to destroy us.”

  “Verlaine and Patti were lurking around in the shadows,” added Chris. “We had three nights with The Marbles, but I think we ended up cancelling the last two because everything was falling apart.”

  Photographer Roberta Bayley, who subsequently shot many iconic images of Blondie and other CBGB’s bands, was working the club’s door at the time of Smith’s sudden departure. “Fred Smith made the big error of his life when he quit Blondie to join Television,” she insisted. “But at that point, Television was the one tipped for big, big success. Blondie was the worst band in the city – they were just a joke. Everybody liked them personally but they didn’t really have it together on a musical level.”

  “They were very shaky but I saw they had potential,” Marty Thau recalls. “I thought the songs were great, but then I also thought that Suicide could be a hit-making group!”

  “I saw Blondie perform at CBGB’s in 1975 with some people from The Factory,” author and Warhol associate Victor Bockris remembers. “I wasn’t really into what they were doing back then. The girl group influences, the last vestiges of glam rock falling away from Chris Stein’s eyes. They were particularly awkward and uncoordinated that night. I remember Debbie beginning to take something off then stopping in the midst of it as if asking the audience, ‘Should I?’ People at my table were saying how much they liked her and what a pity it was that she was so unsure of herself. But it was just this human quality – almost the reverse of punk – that drew me to her.”

  Fred’s exit undermined any sense of progress and sent Blondie’s collective spirits into a nosedive. Debbie considered auditioning for pop outfits and even learned some of the material that Rufus siren Chaka Khan was then filling dancefloors with. “I felt hopeless and sometimes perhaps hapless but I never felt intimidated,” she recalled. “People would come up to me and say, ‘You know you should join a cover band and work out in Jersey,’ and they would insult the shit out of me. But I stuck with my own thing. I had Chris, actually. Chris was terrific.”

  Chris made what he later described as a “half-hearted effort” to hook up with the newly formed Heartbreakers, and, despite having only played one gig with Blondie, Clem tried out for Patti Smith’s band. Unwisely, he opted to hold his audition at Blondie’s midtown rehea
rsal room and was spotted by Debbie, adding to a sense of growing animosity that had begun to infect the scene.

  “Patti helped coerce [Fred] away from us, helped take Fred over to the other side,” declared Chris. “Everything on the CBGB’s scene was [cooperative] until the tension started being brought upon us and then it got very competitive immediately. For the first two years it was really very communal. I remember playing with all [Television’s] equipment – using their guitars and amps. For some reason we had to do a show and we didn’t bring any equipment.”

  As if to add to the general sense of despondency, on May 28, 1975 Eric Emerson’s full-tilt life came to an abrupt end when his body was found near the West Side Highway, next to his motorcycle. His death was apparently a hit and run. Eric had been living with Barbara Winter, former wife of multi-instrumentalist Edgar Winter.

  “We were sitting around the house just after we woke up when Barbara called with the bad news,” Deborah recounted. “He had been a good friend and inspiration to so many people. We didn’t quite understand what had happened, but we went up to a party/wake held for him and saw a lot of people from the earlier glitter days. Eric’s death definitely marked an end to the glitter period. We still miss him.”

  Remembering her former partner, Elda Gentile observes, “When Eric got up in the morning, it was like watching a child awake to a new day. He never woke up ragged or worn out by his extreme life. Every day was new and full of possibility to him. He loved life and was very much ahead of his time artistically. Eric was the love of my life, the father of my son Branch and grandpa of my three beautiful grandchildren.